“Desi Keiser. Tomas didn’t mention you were back in town. In fact, no one did.” He shakes hands with me.
Heat fills my face. “He doesn’t know yet. Neither does anyone else. It’s going to be a surprise.”
A good one, I hope.
“Ah.” He steps aside. “Welcome, then, I suppose.”
“Thanks.” He leads me into the kitchen where we settle at the table.
“How does this happen? I haven’t signed any papers yet. Think I’m still trying to talk myself into it.”
“I’ve already done some preliminary research this morning, over in Webley.” I break out my tablet and start going through everything with him, outlining the process. I have a boilerplate contract to start with, but I need to fill in all the details, and that will take me a few hours and a little more research. “We’ll need to get the land surveyed, too. I’ll take care of hiring someone for that at the firm’s expense.” Fortunately, there’s no one in Maudlin Falls who does that, meaning one less chance of someone tipping off Tomas.
After about thirty minutes, he slowly nods. “Okay, then,” he softly says. “Seems straightforward enough, I guess.” Then he sadly sighs.
I blame my inattention on my personal life. I should have picked up on this a lot sooner. I switch off the tablet and set it aside. “Are you sure you want to sell? You aren’t obligated to do this. If you’ve reconsidered, it’s fine to say that. I’ll tell them you’ve changed your mind. There is no purchase contract yet. Or I can write the contract with a cooling-off period in it for you to change your mind without penalty and cancel, in case you want to.”
A grizzled, gnarled hand rubs at the back of his neck as his voice cracks. “No, I don’t want to sell it. Unfortunately, I have to. I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve buried a wife and children and parents and siblings here. I don’t want to lose it, either. The only reason I’m selling it is to keep it from eventually getting sold out from under me on the courthouse steps for not being able to pay the taxes. Another couple of years or so will completely wipe me out. And it’s a shame about Tomas, too.”
My stomach clenches, fear spiking through me. “What do you mean?”
Keith sighs. “His store. This will probably shut him down. I do feel guilty about that. I hope people won’t hate me.”
My fear transforms to confusion. “Again, what do you mean? I don’t understand.”
He stares out the kitchen window, which looks over the fallow fields. “The Mega Warehouse. It’ll be one of their largest stores in this part of the country, as well as a regional distribution center. That’s what they told me they’re going to build here. I didn’t want to be responsible for a bunch of houses overrunning everything. At least it’ll add some more jobs locally.”
My fear returns. “I…I wasn’t told that. I was told it would be a commercial shopping center.”
He gives me a look that tells me he wonders how smart I really am. “Bless your heart.”
Heat fills my face, a mix of embarrassment and anger that I was lied to. “I really didn’t know!”
He sighs again as his focus returns to the fields beyond. “This property’s been in my family over a hundred years. I wish I could make them promise not to tear down the old buildings, and make them promise to preserve the graveyard.”
“Wait…what?”
He snorts. “Desiderio, you seem like a nice and smart enough fellow, but you’re really in over your head about this, aren’t you?”
“Just…Holdon a minute.” This is all news to me and my head’s spinning. “What old buildings? What graveyard?”
He sadly shakes his head at me. “Let me guess—no one told you any of that either, did they? I disclosed it all to them. Sent the hand-drawn maps with the approximate locations and everything. To that guy, what’s his name? Fred? I told him I wanted it written into the sales contract, but he said he that wasn’t standard procedure.”
My mind reels as my anger builds. I knew Freddy was involved in some of the initial discussions about this before it was handed off to me to deal with, but I didn’t know he’d actually talked to Keith Barnes directly.
Freddy knows my connection to Maudlin Falls. I’ve never made a secret about my past. “No, I wasn’t told any of this.Whatbuildings?”
“The old church, for starters. The first schoolhouse in the area. The old jail and what was city hall. At least fifty graves, that I know of. Several of which I unfortunately dug myself. It was the area’s first graveyard. My family bought that parcel of land over seventy years ago and promised to keep the graveyard intact.”
He stands and leads me outside, where he points toward a wooded section in the far southwest corner. “All over there. About three acres, give or take. Some ruins of other buildings, too.” He turns and points to the woody stand of trees just past his house. “Over there, that’s the old mercantile and another two cabins.”
“Does anyone else know about this?”
“Everyone knows about it. The old-timers, anyway. Problem is, no one really seems to care anymore. Not if it costs them money or time or effort. A couple of the history teachers used to bring kids out on field trips a couple of times a year, but that’s been years now since they did that. I guess safety issues or budget cutbacks or something. Never told me why.
“A few months ago, I asked around to several people I know have money to see if they wanted to pool their resources or something to buy and preserve those parcels at least, but none of them did. No one I know can afford to buy it and farm it. I even looked into leasing farmland to one of those corporate outfits, but they wanted me to make my neighbors sign all sorts of seed patent agreements, which I didn’t understand, that could hold them liable if anything sprouted in their fields. That was a bunch of BS, so I told them to forget it.”
He shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his overalls. “It’s really sad it’s come to this.”
